Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

One hundred and forty thousand and sixty one dollars and ninety six cents
October 29, 2007

I’ve been trying to have my 401k from my old employer transferred into a new tax-deferred “vehicle”. I finally managed to get all of the paperwork handled, and sent it all away to be processed. Recently I received a notice that there was a certified letter to pick up at the post office.

Digressing into my first annoyance- I am home all day, pretty much every day, because I work from home. Please, Ms. Postwoman, knock on my door instead of filling out one of those stupid little pink cards and making me trek to the postoffice, which is way off yonder toward Yellow Springs, aka “nowhere”. Anyway…

Throttling
October 26, 2007

The past two weeks have seen an upswing in posts around here, and the consequence is that more spiders stop by, and the consequence is that they find the search links on the right. When the spiders hit the search links in quick succession without loading anything else, it digs a big crater where the server used to be. Well, I’m tired of that.

There are a ton of nasty bots that aren’t obeying the robots.txt, and really I think it can’t be relied upon to prevent the most heinous bots from destroying a site’s productive page serving. I’ve thrown some Apache modules at the issue, but they don’t seem to help. I’ve specifically excluded sections of the site from certain user agents, and that seems to do well, but there’s no avoiding getting trounced by these freaking ill-behaved spiders and comment spamming bots.

Make Twitter Useful
October 19, 2007

I’ve gotten a flood of new people following me on Twitter over the past couple days. If you had done this a week ago, you would already know all about how hectic my work has been this week, how I missed my train into the city to meet up with that work this morning, and how I plowed into the back of a BMW on 202 as a result of missing my train.

If you had signed up a month or two ago, you would have been able to follow my Habari tour from Philly down to BlogOrlando up to Columbus and back. In fact, I told Berta- Don’t expect me to call, you will be more informed about what I’m up to if you look at my Twitter page.

Get a Job, You Long-Haired Hippie!
October 18, 2007

We were discussing in our meeting yesterday why it’s so hard to find developers. I had a long-winded and complicated explanation.

Developers come in many varieties, with a wide range of experience. There are lots of people that call themselves “developers”, but a .net developer is not a PHP developer which is not a java developer. Each has different skills, and while picking up a new language may be easier for someone who already codes, they will lack all of the special knowledge of that language.

The Month of Doom
October 17, 2007

I’m writing this post from the Septa R5 into Philadelphia, on my way to Suburban Station and a day of work at a temporary office across the street from Liberty Place. That may be one breath of a sentence, but it’s appropriate for the month I’m having.

Deadlines for work have gotten… interesting. And in the midst of it all, I have meetings with big clients for the rest of the week. Next week I give a presentation on PHP frameworks, specifically CodeIgniter, which is fun since I haven’t used it since maybe June, coincidentally for the client that I’m meeting in the city today. At some point before this major deadline I need to take some time out to watch Riley, since Nana is going on vacation with mom.